As published for Critical Condition on nationalreview.com on March 11th, 2010:

The New England Journal of Medicine’s Career Center has a report by the Medicus Firm talking about how the Democrats’ health bills would drive doctors out of the profession. According to the report, “nearly one-third of physicians responding to the survey indicated that they will want to leave medical practice after health reform is implemented.” At the same time, they report that the Bureau of Labor Statistics predicts that the U.S. will need 22 percent more doctors by 2018. Worse, 46 percent of primary-care docs said that they would leave or try to leave medicine as a result of the proposed overhaul’s changes to the system.

Reasons that doctors would want to leave include a fear that “reform could result in a significant decline in the overall quality of medical care nationwide” and that “reform will cause income to decrease, while workload will increase.”

Read the full post here